The Complexity of Shame

Abstract

Sandra Buechler has made a very important contribution to our understanding of the role psychoanalytic training can play in the generation and deepening of shame in psychoanalytic candidates. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that this culture of shame will come to include our patients unless we become more aware of humiliation processes in training. Likewise. Andrew Morrison again movingly describes for us the personal experience of shame. My contribution is to contextualize shame, and to argue that while shame may be experienced individually, it is a relational and systemic phenomenon in its genesis, maintenance, and consequences.